We try and ensure this page is updated as soon as possible with incidents as they happen. Live discussion of issues as they happen is usually available on IRC.

Our support number is 033 33 400 999, or you can email support@aa.net.uk or text 01344 400 999 to raise a support ticket. (If you believe there is a major issue, that affects multiple customers and that is not shown here, please start your text with MSO which will wake staff if necessary).

Please use our Ideas site if you have ideas or suggestions regarding our service.

Thursday evenings, from 10pm, are designated as a general maintenance window where we will perform non-service affecting updates.

For most of this year we've been open on Saturdays, with staff available on phone/irc/email/etc. Due to the very low number of enquiries in the afternoon, from December we're slightly reducing the hours we are open. The new Saturday hours will be from 10AM until 2PM.

Our NAT64 gateway has historically allowed access from outside our customer base for those wishing to experiment with IPv6 only networks. Sadly, due to abuse, we are now locking this down to customer IP addresses only.
See http://aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-ipv6-nat64.html for further information on the NAT64 gateway.

Sorry for the short notice, but we're carrying out a PEW tonight (the 31st of October) at 22:00 which will affect access to the control pages and to email systems. The window is an hour, but we expect the work to complete much more quickly than that.

Our plastic card printing service now allows multiple copies of the same card.

The original design was very much around ID cards where each card would have a different set of name, photo, barcode, other fields, and be printed once.

However, many people have used for things like business cards, wifi password cards, and all sorts where multiple prints of the same card are needed. So we have now allowed a quantity against each card.

We use two data centres in London, Equinix and (Telecity). Equinix have planned engineering works on their power feeds on the morning of 2nd August as follows:

Investigations into the power incident that occurred on Wednesday 20th July 2016 have concluded that the outage was caused by the malfunction of the protection module on the
primary circuit breaker for the A power riser in Building 8/9 of Equinix's LD8 (Harbour Exchange) data centre. An identical protection module is installed on the B riser power supply.
It is now essential that both circuit breakers are replaced. In order to carry out this work safely it is necessary to power down the affected circuits in accordance with the following
schedule in the early hours of 2nd August 2016:

A Power riser:
Power down: 00:00
Reenergise: 01:00 or sooner once work is complete

B Power riser:
Power down: 02:00
Reenergise: 03:00 or sooner once work is complete

All our equipment is dual power - so we do not expect there to be any problems during this period.

We can see a major routing issue, and we are investigating. Not entirely clear the extent of the problem at this stage.

Update
20 Jul 08:21:55

At the moment we are seeing what appears to be an issue with the links between London and Maidenhead. This can impact some Ethernet customers, VoIP, hosting, etc. However, a number of systems have a fallback for this, so many are still working, e.g our VoIP services are OK.

Update
20 Jul 08:22:23

The link is partially back, and we are investigating the cause.

Update
20 Jul 10:19:15

This is looking like a major fault within BT's core network. This is affecting many ISPs in the UK. We'll post more details when we can.

This fault is affecting our communications with BT's systems. This means that our sales and support staff have very limited access to BT's ordering, diagnostic and fault reporting problems. so please to bear with us as staff will be struggling to do their work at the moment. (TalkTalk lines are ok though)

Update
20 Jul 10:35:40

This is looking related to a power issue at a major london datacentre

Update
20 Jul 10:48:05

We've had an update from BT regarding this issue, they say:
There is an intermittent incident affecting the Openreach B2B and XML Gateways, as a result of this issue you may be experiencing a delay in the receipt of KCI's for both Fulfilment and Assurance requests as well as failures in Dialogue Services.

Update
20 Jul 12:40:00

It looks like everything affected by this outage has returned to normal now.

Update
20 Jul 12:40:06

It looks like everything affected by this outage has returned to normal now.

Update
20 Jul 12:40:23

It looks like everything affected by this outage has returned to normal now.

A number of customers were emailed that their 1st of month DD was cancelled.

This process was stopped as soon as we realised what was happening so not many people will be affected. You will receive normal DD collection notices in due course for your monthly bills or have collection within 3 working days as per exiting notice (so may be 3rd instead of 1st) as per DD rules.

Our DD management system is coded to be as cautious and customer focused as possible and a minor error meant it was not happy with the DDs for regular collections being in place before the invoice was issued. This has been corrected now.

We use IRC all the time here at AAISP, both internally between staff teams and in helping our customers. Many customers have their own IRC client setup on their computer whilst others pop in to the IRC channel by using the web-based version we provide via our website.

To help improve the experience for customers using our web-based irc client we have a new one to try:

Just to be clear on our policy here - when DRIPA comes in to force, and if A&A become subject to a retention notice for all customers, we aim to work on all practical legal means to minimise the amount of data retained under that legislation - making full use of the bad wording in the Schedule in the 2009 regulations where possible. We also aim to clearly publish what is retained under such a notice and what steps we have taken to minimise such data. Such steps may mean separate companies running email or other services, or even hosting some servers outside the UK, if those are practical steps we can take.
Why? Because blanket mass surveillance is illegal under EU law as it is against our basic human right to privacy as decided by a court, that's why!
Feel free to comment on my blog.

Here are the office opening hours for Christmas:
Thu 24th Open 8am - 4pm
Fri 25th Closed
Sat 26th Closed
Sun 27th Closed
Mon 28th Closed
Tue 29th Open 9am - 5pm
Wed 30th Open 9am - 5pm
Thur 31st Open 9am - 4pm
Fri 1st Closed
Sat 2nd Closed
Sun 3rd Closed
Mon 4th Back to normal
We are pleased to confirm that customers on our "units" based tariffs will again benefit from a Christmas special rate between Christmas and New Year.
The three normal working days between Christmas and New Year will be a Christmas special rate which consumes no units regardless of the amount of usage. That is 29th Dec, 30th Dec, and 31st Dec. The 26th Dec and 27th Dec being normal Weekend rates. The 25th Dec, 28th Dec, 1st Jan, and (for lines in Scotland) 4th Jan, are the "Holiday" rate (same usage levels as weekends).

As part of our core network upgrades on Saturday 20th February we'll be replacing switches on the Telecity side of our network. Most of our connectivity is via Telehouse and so disruption will be minimal and we do not expect customers to be affected by this. Traffic that normally goes via Telecity will be moved over to Telehouse. The work will be carried out during the day.

Update
20 Feb 12:00:41

The work in Telecity will be starting from around 1pm today. As mentioned, we expect customer impact to be very low, at worst there may be a few seconds where some routes are unavailable, but this will be kept to a minimum.

Update
20 Feb 15:57:21

We've had an issue moving one of our routers. This has caused a blip, and for some customers, parts of the Internet to become temporarily unavailable. We are working on it, and apologise for the inconvenience.

Update
20 Feb 16:02:54

Fixed now. Sorry. We replaced two cables, and reconnected them back to front. Really. We then looked at all the complicated reasons for the failure, then finally re-checked the cables. Then spotted they were the wrong way around.
Sorry again.

Following the recent media attention to the 'cyberattack' and possible data theft from TalkTalk, we asked our account manager how this affects us and our customers. The response was: "The attack was on our consumer website and doesn't impact our partner accounts and customers."

The service we buy from TalkTalk is their wholesale/'partner' account services which is kept separate from TalkTalk's 'consumer' services as much as possible. At the moment in time AAISP are confident that the statement above means that our own data and our customer's data is unaffected by this recent attack.

We are investigating a network issue affecting most customers with packet loss - this impacts broadband, ethernet, VoIP, and all services.

Update
18 Nov 2015 21:50:44

We're still working on this....

Update
18 Nov 2015 22:23:32

We are being severely DOS'd, our usual anti-DOS systems have not helped this time due to the nature of the attack. Needless to say, we are working to mitigate this.

Update
18 Nov 2015 22:40:25

Things are not perfect, but we have mitigated most of the problems

Update
19 Nov 2015 00:11:00

The network has been stable for over an hour now. There are are a very small number of customers who are offline. We will be contacting them in the morning, However do call our Support Team from 8am.

Update
19 Nov 2015 07:20:56

Whilst service is mostly stable, we are going to have to do more work on this during the day. We'll try and keep disruption to a minimum.

Update
19 Nov 2015 09:03:54

The DDOS has moved to a new target block which has caused more problems again - we are working on this still, but service is improving again.

Update
19 Nov 2015 09:04:57

Looking good now - a handful of customers off line totally but we are working on that now.

Update
19 Nov 2015 09:19:29

Side Note: This wasn't an attacks against our network or servers specifically, it wasn't a 'hacking' attempt like we've seen in the news recently. This was a denial of service attack, probably, against a particular customer. We may not get to the bottom of why this customer was attacked but we are investigating.

Update
19 Nov 2015 10:02:26

Some customer are having their WAN IP address changed to get them on-line. Some customers with blocks of IPs are being contacted regarding a change of IP address block. Obviously if you need the IP to be reinstated once this issue is resolved, we are happy to do that.

Update
19 Nov 2015 11:31:50

Looking a lot better now - monitoring carefully. Impacted customers should now be on line.

We tend to do server maintenance on Thursday evenings. We'll be doing some security updates on servers this evening which will involve some reboots. These tend to be quick, and so service should only be affected for a few minutes. We'll be rebooting the following servers: Control Pages, Email servers, Web servers as well as a few servers that are not accessed by customers directly.

We are making a number of minor changes to the billing system, so as to improve the way the bills are presented, and importantly to improve the quality of the code itself. The billing system has had to evolve over more than 18 years and is in need of some tidying.
We are not changing prices, and so bills should not actually change in total.
We are changing the order that things are presented, and in some cases the number of line items shown, to try and make the bills clearer.
There are a lot of different scenarios to test, and we aim to catch them all, but if anyone thinks there is a billing error, or simply something that looks confusing, please do let us know right away.
Rest assured that will work to correct any billing errors promptly if they do occur.

Update
12 May 2015 13:42:36

Changes have gone well, and dry runs of next month's invoices show the amounts match up. We are pretty confident that there will not be any issues, but please do let us know of any problems with invoices.

We're making progress on our backup link as well as investigating the cause of the main fault.

Update
05 May 2015 18:57:51

We do apologise about our connectivity problems this afternoon. We have been running on our backup FTTC line, and we're investigating why the direct fibre is down.

Update
06 May 2015 10:34:33

Our main internet connection is still down this morning. We have a number of BT engineers working on this at the moment. This does mean that we are running on our backup FTTC links and most things are working OK! Some telephone calls are a little temperamental, we'd appreciate customers using IRC or email where possible, see: http://aa.net.uk/kb-irc.html for details of connecting to IRC. We hope to be back to normal later this morning.

Update
06 May 2015 11:57:53

BT have identified 2 faults with our fibre. They have fixed one of them (a kink in a fibre patch lead in Bracknell exchange) and are investigating the second (low light level on one leg).

We have extended our support hours, which are now 8am to 6pm, Mon-Fri, except (English) public holidays.

Previously we worked 9am to 5pm, and sales/accounts still do. However the support staff can usually address simple/urgent queries in those areas if necessary.

Occasionally we do have people ask why we only work office hours, and it is worth trying to explain this. Many ISPs do, indeed, have 24 hour telephone support, for example.

For most of our services, there are faults that come in two flavours. Either there is some big issue (a major outage), in which case we have staff, getting involved in fixing things whatever time it is, or an individual line fault for DSL. It is pretty rare to have individual faults for VoIP, SIMs, etc, but you can, of course, get line faults for DSL.

When it comes to individual DSL faults, there are a load of things people can do at home/office to eliminate equipment and test for themselves, and we offer various on-line tests via our control pages.[1] This can help resolve things. But the issues that don't just go away, and would require support staff to do something, are almost always something that needs a BT engineer to go out.

With very few exceptions, BT engineers are not going to be going our any quicker if we book them next working day at 9am. So having support staff take calls in the middle of the night would not usually be any help. We also have no intention of farming support out to call centres following scripts.

However, we have decided to extend the hours a bit. The reasons being :-
BT engineers work 8am to 6pm normally, and so we can help address any issues that come up with an engineer visit, and talk to the engineer or our customer about it at the time. This has already been seen with some 8am visits by engineers who are confused by the notes and need us to explain.
Starting at 8am gives customers a chance to resolve issues that can be resolved by talking to support before the usual working day for most people. If it is a line fault, that is not much help, but if it is a matter of swap a router or reboot something, we can offer the necessary advice before you have an office full of people that cannot work.
Starting at 8am and finishing a 6pm allows a lot of people that work during the day to contact us from home where they have an issue with their home broadband. We know some customers appreciate that.
We have increased the number of support staff, allowing some staggered working hours so that we can offer this.
But please do bear in mind, we do have irc[2], with a simple web front end, which can offer various help and advice by staff and other customers at all sorts of times. It is informal support from staff outside normal hours, but is usually available. We are thinking of perhaps extending this to be more formal evening irc support at some point maybe, with a rota of some sort.

Obviously we're interested in feedback on how the new support hours work for customers.

Over the next few days we are working on some minor changes to the way we handle passwords on the control pages (clueless).
At these first stages you should see no impact, but there is a risk of issues, and we would ask anyone with problems logging in to control pages, changing passwords, or logging in to DSL, SIMs, etc, to let us know.
Each stage is being tested on our test system and then deployed, with the first stage expected to be updated tonight.
The final stage will mean a change on where passwords are visible, and the processes for issuing and changing passwords. We'll post more details closer to the time.
This is all part of ongoing work to improve security. Thank you for your understanding.

Update
02 Apr 2015 15:53:01

The first stage seems to have gone well - our test/monitoring has been working well to help us check any anomalies and ensure consistency.
The next stage should be equally harmless as it means changing over various systems to use the new password hashes. We plan to work on this over Easter.
We will then go on to change the way passwords are issued when ordering and updated when customers wish to change them.
This work is all part of general review and update of security for passwords on our various systems. Thank you for your understanding.

Update
03 Apr 2015 12:55:34

We are progressing with updates - the login to the control pages is now switched over to the new hashes - any issues, please let me know on irc, but all looks good from here.
The RADIUS logins have changed over as well, to use line based passwords (which are same as control pages login passwords at present). Again, please let us know any issues, but so far all looks well.
The next step later today will be a change to how you change the password on the control pages - this will move to the same system we use on the accounts pages - an emailed link that offers a new passwords via https. This is safer than plain text emailed passwords.
Once that is complete, we plan to update he way passwords are issued when ordering new services, which will hopefully be done later today.
There will then be more testing and cleaning up to be done later.

Update
04 Apr 2015 06:53:08

The first side effect that has been noted is that passwords on the control pages are now case-sensitive. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Update
04 Apr 2015 11:19:58

We expect the work for there weekend to stop now - with more later in the week or next weekend. We are at a stage now that we need to provide some clear documentation on the different levels of passwords and what levels of protection are provided for these in our systems.

Update
05 Apr 2015 13:06:22

We are going ahead with more of the work this weekend now, and expect to separate control page login passwords from Line/DSL login passwords today or tomorrow. We'll post more details once the work is complete. We are currently running tests on out tests systems now.

Update
05 Apr 2015 13:50:44

We have now separated login passwords and line passwords.
Any issues, please let us know.

We now have a new official URL for our Status Pages: https://aastatus.net The reason for the change is to make the status pages completely independent of any AAISP infrastructure. They were already hosted on a server in Amsterdam out side of our network, and now the DNS is independent too. Anyone using status.aa.net.uk should update to use aastatus.net

We have had a couple of incidents over the last few weeks with some external routes vanishing from our network. Whilst this may seem quite minor it simply should not happen. As such we are working on some investigation over the next few days. This may mean re-loading some routers to add additional diagnostics. In general this is a pretty seamless operation as packets are re-routed around the equipment that is being reloaded. However, there is a small risk of issues.

Update
25 Nov 2014 10:25:38

Investigations are going well and have not needed any changes yet. We may be reloading two routers later today (Tuesday) which should have little or no impact, but will help us with diagnostics.

Update
01 Dec 2014 09:22:04

We think we may have found the cause of the routing issue, and plan to upgrade some routers during the week. This should be relatively seamless.

Update
01 Dec 2014 17:11:04

Some router upgrades this evening (Monday). We have seen this cause a blip on TalkTalk lines before, but hopefully that will not happen this time. In any case we expect any disruption to be a few seconds at most, and for most people none at all.

Resolution

The changes seem to have worked. We will also be upgrading again later in the week. Thank you all for your patience.

Once again, the Direct Debits have not gone through on the 1st and so have caused an emailed notice for collection and hence they are going out on the 8th. Obviously they are going out on the date notified in the email, but I appreciate that a few extra days credit may be inconvenient for some people expecting the DD on the 1st. We are working on this. The problem is that the system has been desigend very "defensively" so that any doubt at all on the emailed advance notice will result in a new emailed 5 working days notice to be absolutely sure we are meeting the DD rules.

Over the next few days we expect to do some minor updates. Previous work has made it so that these are seamless, but there is always a risk of some impact. Plans are to do work before 8am though some backup routers may be updated at otehr times (and expect to be no risk). We will also be doing some overnight rolling LNS updates As ever, we may update test routers/LNS at any time.

Update
24 Oct 2014 18:15:46

Updates this morning were around 5am with one extra at 8am, but they show as virtually no disruption to any traffic. Several "B" routers have been done today. We are doing an LNS roll over tonight and more routers in the morning. The testing over the last few weeks has been very good, and allowed us to track down some minor issues that simply did not show on the bench test systems.

We are seeing what looks to be routing problems within our network with traffic to/from our Maidenhead datacentre. Routes seem to be flapping and disrupting connectivity with increased latency and packet loss. This would be affecting Ethernet services from Maidenhead as well as customers accessing web and email services that we host in Maidenhead. Customers are also reporting DNS problems.

Update
25 Aug 2014 22:19:09

Engineers are investigating...

Update
25 Aug 2014 23:33:53

Staff are still working on this. The cause of the problem has been identified and is being worked on.

Update
25 Aug 2014 23:50:13

The problem has been resolved, traffic is now back to normal, we apologise for this inconvenience.

We have added a new section clarifying engineer visits and missed appointments. The confirms the "point of no return" for rearranging appointments, and clarifies compensation either way when an appointment is missed.
We have also added two additional reasons for charging an admin fee (£5+VAT). We hope you think these are reasonable. It is a bit of a shame that such things are necessary. We think it is not fair for such costs to be part of our overheads and so affect the price for everyone else who is being reasonable.
1. If you send us a bogus invoice which we validly reject (e.g. trying to invoice us for a delayed install when we do not guarantee install dates). Also for each further exchange of correspondence on such invoices.
2. If you attempt to take us to ADR when you are not entitled to (e.g. if you have not followed our complaints procedures, or you are a company of more than 10 staff, or you are, or have said you are, a communications provider). We will also charge any fees we end up paying as a result of such an attempt if accepted by the ADR provider.
Any questions, please let us know.

The recent router upgrades have now seen some issues (last night). This means we expect to do more upgrades (or downgrades) over the next few days. We'll know more later today. If there are further issues this may end up being done during the day even, but this looks unlikely.

Update
12 Aug 2014 17:42:46

One of the routers showing problems (a.aimless) had a further issue today, and as part of the defensive design of our kit has automatically downgraded to the previous release. We are still investigating the cause of this issue.

Update
14 Aug 2014 17:30:32

We have a much better handle on the problem, and it looks related to "stuff" out on the internet having an unexpected knock-on effect on our routers. We have some plans for further changes that will address this.

Many customers have regular payments on 1st of the month and so do not get a separate Direct Debit notice each month.
Unfortunately, this month, the system did not run correctly meaning that Direct Debits were not collected today. As such they are being re-notified with the agreed 5 working days notice for collection on 8th or 9th.
This should return to normal next month.
Sorry for any confusion that may be caused by this.